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When I was supposed to be awake, I was asleep. When I was supposed to sleep, I was silent. When a pleasure offered itself to me, I avoided it.

Susanna Kaysen

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Susanna Kaysen
Age: 76
Born: 1948
Born: November 11
Author
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Cambridge
Massachusetts
Avoided
Asleep
Offered
Awake
Supposed
Silent
Sleep
Pleasure

More quotes by Susanna Kaysen

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As far as I could see, life demanded skills I didn't have.
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My chronic feelings of emptiness and boredom came from the fact that I was living a life based on my incapacities, which were numerous.
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Don’t ask me those questions! Don’t ask me what life means or how we know reality or why we have to suffer so much. Don’t talk about how nothing feels real, how everything is coated with gelatin and shining like oil in the sun. I don’t want to hear about the tiger in the corner or the Angel of Death or the phone calls from John the Baptist.
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I'm your mind, it claims. You can't parse ME into dendrites and synapses
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Mental illness seems to be a communication problem between interpreters one and two.
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It was my misfortune-or salvation-to be at all times perfectly conscious of my misperceptions of reality.
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My family had a lot of characteristics - achievements, ambitions, talents, expectations - that all seemed to be recessive in me.
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Maybe I was just flirting with madness the way I flirted with my teachers and my classmates.
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Lunatics are similar to designated hitters. Often an entire family is crazy, but since an entire family can't go into the hospital, one person is designated as crazy and goes inside. Then, depending on how the rest of the family is feeling that person is kept inside or snatched out, to prove something about the family's mental health.
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You have to have a somewhat cold heart to be a writer.
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It was a spring day, the sort that gives people hope: all soft winds and delicate smells of warm earth. Suicide weather.
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I told her once I wasn’t good at anything. She told me survival is a talent.
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Was insanity just a matter of dropping the act?
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I am not a nurse escorting six lunatics to the ice cream parlor.
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Something about the goat dancing made me want to cry.
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In a strange way we were free. We'd reached the end of the line. We had nothing more to lose. Our privacy, our liberty, our dignity: all of this was gone and we were stripped down to the bare bones of our selves
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When you’re sad you need to hear your sorrow structured into sound.
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There is thought, and then there is thinking about thoughts, and they don't feel the same.
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With wild eyes that had seen freedom.
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Not everything has a happy ending, and not everything has an ending. Some things just kind of dribble away or cut off abruptly.
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